Suddenly our entire domain can't print or obtain their profiles from s

[MichealC4]

I'm losing serious sleep, and hair, over this. I've worked one case with Microsoft and about to work another, and can't get this resolved.

Here's the rundown of what's happening.

- Profiled and non-profiled* machines can't print. It isn't everybody (I've not yet had trouble printing, knock on wood), but it is a lot of people and seems to be getting worse.

- The first case was about when a new user logging in to a machine for the first time, they would get an error about can't find the profile and Windows would give up logging in. One of the machines was fixed by sticking the Default User profile on the network and letting Windows download that during login. That seemed to work for a few others as well, and to my knowledge they aren't having any trouble. However, that's not done much else for us. The printing problem appeared after I enabled icmp echo and echo/reply as appropriate to and from our servers so that Group Policy would work.

- Profiles are not downloading for a lot of profiled* users.

* = profiled/non-profiled meaning profiles are stored on the server with a mandatory setting (ntuser.man) where appropriate. Otherwise profiles are stored on the given machine, such as mine. If you need more information, let me know.

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[MichealC4]

Let's get something straight.

I am not ignoring your advice because I don't want to talk to management. In fact, I'm not ignoring your advice at all. I have suggested this to management long before we started having this problem. It was dismissed by them, not me. So before you try to lay blame with me, try and consider that I've already tried that. I will suggest it once again, but given that I have already suggested more than once before, I don't expect things to go well ...

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[WhoKilledKenny]

I understand that management angle (or lack there of). Goes back to your statment "A hard time is a bit of an understatement." I think Mark's concern is that the problem has not gone away and will only occur when your students arrive on Tuesday and start to work the system again. And I do agree that the best time for making a change is when users are not present, I also understand you hands being tied and you are not the one who makes the ultimate dicision. One thing you can attempt without causing havoc is to go to one of your servers and a least hard code the NIC. I don't know what your switch speeds are so for example, hard code it to 100/FULL. If the NIC stay connected you have at least turned of the Auto Negotiate for that system. There would be no harm in doing this and should the NIC come up disconnected just reset it to Auto. No re-boot is required for this action.

If not, return on Tuesday as I am sure that Mark and I would like to see this problem resolved.

 

[MichealC4]

Right, I appreciate your understanding and helping me out.

I will have a go at hard-coding the NIC to see how that goes and come Tuesday I'll let you know how things go. I'm a little worried about making too many more changes since the changes haven't been stress-tested yet to see if those did indeed fix the problem.

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[WhoKilledKenny]

Be assured that making a change to the NIC setting is a very minor procedure. There will be a momentary disconnect from the network, so I would perform this on a file and print server.

 

[MichealC4]

Yes, I'm not worried about that, but rather if I start making more changes, it will be hard to determine what fixed the problem and what didn't.

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[MichealC4]

Sorry guys for taking so long. I've been out sick.

It appears (knock on wood) that the logon problems have been fixed. However, the printer problems are still there. We seem to have isolated the printer problems to two of our servers. Apart from making the changes to the switches (which I do agree needs to happen), any ideas?

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